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BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Monday, December 3rd, 2018 -- The Free
Software Foundation (FSF) announced it has received several earmarked
charitable donations from Handshake, an organization developing
an experimental peer-to-peer root domain naming system, totaling $1
million. These gifts will support the FSF's organizational capacity,
including its advocacy, education, and licensing initiatives, as well
as specific projects fiscally sponsored by the FSF.

John Sullivan, FSF's executive director, said, "Building on the $1
million Bitcoin gift from the Pineapple Fund earlier this year,
and our record high number of individual associate members, it is
clear that software freedom is more important than ever to the world.
We are now at a pivotal moment in our history, on the cusp of making
free software the 'kitchen table issue' it must be. Thanks to
Handshake and our members, the Free Software Foundation looks forward
to scaling to the next level of free software activism, development,
and community."

Rob Myers of Handshake said, "The FSF is a worldwide leader in the
fight to protect the rights of all computer users through its support
for the production of free software, including the GNU operating
system and its campaigns to raise awareness such as Defective by
Design. Handshake is proud to be able to support the FSF in its
important work to secure our freedom."

These significant contributions from Handshake will fuel the FSF's
efforts with activists, developers, and lawyers around the world.
They include:

$200,000 for Replicant, the fully free mobile operating system
based on Android;

$100,000 for GNU Guix and GuixSD, a package manager supporting
transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package
management, per-user profiles, and more, as well as a distribution
of the GNU operating system using that package manager;

$100,000 for the GNU Toolchain, which provides the foundational
software components of the GNU/Linux system and the Internet.

Replicant developer Denis "GNUtoo" Carikli said, "So far, Replicant
development has been driven by very few individuals contributing to it
in their free time. Donations have been used to enable Replicant
developers to buy new devices to port Replicant on, and to enable new
Replicant developers to work on already-supported devices. They were
also used to enable developers to attend conferences to promote
Replicant and try to find new contributors. The kind of amount we
received will enable Replicant to fund development, first to fix the
most critical bugs, and then to upstream most of its code, making it
more sustainable, and also enabling other projects to reuse
Replicant's work to improve users' freedom."

Guix developer and project committee member Ricardo Wurmus said, "This
donation allows the GNU Guix project to guarantee its independence,
invest in hardware, and develop new features to benefit all our users.
We'll be able to grow the performance and reliability of our existing
infrastructure. We also envision better support for new and liberating
architectures, and more resilient long-term storage of binaries and
source code. It will also allow us to continue our outreach efforts
and attract new interns to further improve and promote the project."

John W. Eaton, original author and primary maintainer of GNU Octave,
said, "We are grateful for such a generous donation. It is by far the
single largest monetary contribution we have ever received, and we
thank Handshake for including Octave in this select group. We have
only begun to imagine how these funds might impact Octave, but given
the size of the gift, we intend something transformational and
previously impossible."

David Edelsohn, founding GCC Steering Committee member and GNU
Toolchain Fund trustee, said "We are incredibly gratified by the
confidence in and support for the GNU Toolchain demonstrated by this
donation. This donation will allow the project to greatly expand its
outreach to students and new developers. It allows us to move forward
on a number of fronts with confidence that we have the resources to
match our imagination."

About the Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to
promoting computer users' right to run, change, share, and
contribute to computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and
use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating
system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free
software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and
political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites,
located at https://fsf.org and https://gnu.org, are an important
source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's
work can be made at https://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in
Boston, MA, USA.

More information about the FSF, as well as important information for
journalists and publishers, is at https://www.fsf.org/press.